Pharmacy
The goal of Providence Saint John's Health Center's pharmacy department is to provide all patients with the highest quality pharmaceutical care in an atmosphere that educates each patient, fosters mutual communication, and invites shared respect. Services provided by the pharmacy department run the gamut and include drug interaction monitoring, patient care rounding, medication teaching, renal drug monitoring, therapeutic drug monitoring, drug order review, and drug information support for health care providers.
Main pharmacy
Providence Saint John's main pharmacy is located in the Chan Soon-Shiong Center for Life Sciences. The main pharmacy serves inpatients, outpatients and emergency patients.The pharmacy is open 24 hours every day.
Satellite pharmacy
A satellite pharmacy, located in the south wing near the main hospital building, serves only surgical patients. It is open Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The pharmacy department offers a unit-based clinical pharmacy program, in which pharmacists spend considerable time out on the unit floors doing order entry and clinical work that includes dose adjustment and renal failure assessment. New orders are then checked and filled in the main pharmacy and sent back up to the patient floors where they originated.
The department is fully automated and capable of ensuring maximum patient and operational safety at all times. Safety measures include Omnicell, a software program used to monitor controlled substances and other frequently used drugs. As an added benefit to staff and patients, a pain control pharmacist who completes rounds five days per week to evaluate patient-controlled analgesia and provide consults. The turnaround time for the department to fill prescriptions is two hours for most patients and 30 minutes for urgent requisitions.
The pharmacy department consists of 16 full-time pharmacists and six per-diem pharmacists, as well as technical and support personnel who work together to assure that patients receive the highest quality pharmaceutical care possible. Eight pharmacists are on site during the day and at least one is available in the pharmacy during the evening hours.
At Providence Saint John's, thousands of patients are treated every year, translating to nearly 1.5 million doses of medication dispensed annually, a significant number for any community hospital. With numbers such as those, hospitals must have confidence in their staff and their capabilities. Nowhere is that confidence more evident than in the pharmacy department at Providence Saint John’s.